“Reed, you—” I started to say.
“Move!” Reed shouted as another blast of green came zipping at us. He grabbed me by the shirt and yanked me forward. I stumbled behind him as he hauled ass for cover, another red laser shot the diameter of a fence pole chasing after us and ripping apart a console in a shower of sparks.
I followed him, not stopping until he did, damn near running into him as he came to an abrupt halt in the shadow of a shattered catwalk. The factory had definitely taken some damage, and pieces of metal were everywhere, lying in pools of chemicals, a wash of different ones mingling like rivers running together all over the floor. “What are you stopping for?” I yelled, and then I saw.
“What the hell are you two doing?” Scott was standing in our path, next to Jamal, the two of them good and covered in some sort of chemical mixture. Jamal looked like he’d sweated green, big globs of liquid on his glasses.
“Running from trouble while we regroup,” Reed said. “I suggest you do the same.” And he started to detour around Scott without so much as an explanation or a question about what had happened to the two of them.
I followed him, slapping Jamal on the shoulder. “You’re going to want to be running when this dude we were fighting comes around the corner in a second. He’s bad news.”
“Yeah, well, we got some bad news of our own standing here,” Jamal said calmly, not even wiping the moisture off his glasses. It looked thick all up and down his shirt, too, like he’d gotten doused.
“This guy is a two hundred on the energy projection side of metahuman ability,” Reed tossed back, continuing to move toward the back of the factory and only slowing a little to address them. “On a scale of one to ten, guys. He’s trouble.”
“Yeah, I can feel him,” Scott said, standing riveted to the spot. “That’s the problem with being in a desert environment, not a lot of moisture in the air, and these chemicals being outside my control … only a couple sources of liquid in this place. It gives me some clarity.”
Reed just stopped dead, because neither Jamal nor Scott was heeding our warning. “Clarity? Scott, this guy is going to vaporize your ass if you don’t move it!”
Scott held out a hand, waiting for Mr. Energy coming around the corner. Like he could stop it, as if he was Neo and those laser beams were bullets. “Don’t worry, Reed … I got this.”
Reed looked like he was fighting the temptation to run, to get the hell out of there and let Scott experience this ever-closing hell for himself. I knew how he felt, because I was feeling it myself, coupled with a desire to grab Jamal by his nasty-ass wet collar and drag him along with me as I beat feet for the damned hills like a sensible person, one who knew that his mama would kill him if he let his brother get wiped out by a dude with laser beam eyes.
But something about preppie boy’s demeanor, his calm assurance, and Jamal’s steadfast refusal to run in the face of Reed and me telling him to GTFO made me hesitate. It was a pretty stupid idea, one that flew in the face of all my best instincts, but I stood there with them, every muscle in my body clenched, waiting for something to happen.
Mr. Energy came around the corner, his hands all aglow. He was charging up a blast, the kind that I could see already was going to go big, not home, and it was going to take half the damned building with it. The reflected glare of anger and hate glowed in his eyes, shining under the flickering light that was growing from his hands, the luminescent intensity growing stronger as he let the energy build, and build—
His face jerked in pain, and suddenly Mr. Energy’s big-ass blast started to fade, the intensity going down like someone had started sliding a dimmer switch on his light show. He spasmed, sticking his chest out, throwing his head back like he wanted to howl at the moon. “The hell …?” I muttered. “Is he turning into a werewolf?”
“No,” Jamal said. “Wrong monster, wrong side.”
“What are you talking ab—?” I only got out that much before the answer came, in a rather spectacular fashion.
Mr. Energy’s chest burst open in a cloud of dark red fluid, a hundred veins bursting all at once and carrying all of his blood out of his body in a massive expulsion of liquid. The dark red cloud coalesced and writhed like a living thing, pulled toward Scott and his waiting hand. It floated there in front of him, little dots of extraneous material dripping out of the cloud as the elements of the blood he couldn’t control expelled themselves from the part that he could.
“Holy hell!” I shouted. “You just became Count Dracula’s wet dream!”
“I don’t know which was grosser, what he did or what you just said,” Reed said.
“He just drained a man’s body of all its blood, this ain’t a tough choice,” I said as Mr. Energy’s exsanguinated corpse pitched forward lifelessly. He didn’t even move or twitch, nothing.
“I think the real moral of the story here,” Jamal said, “is that you shouldn’t mess with a super Poseidon in a dry environment unless you want to become a blood donor in a very major way.”
“Did you do that before?” Reed asked, pushing past me to stand next to Scott, who was still holding the cloud of blood in front of him. It wasn’t as big as I would have thought it would be.
“Yeah,” Jamal answered for him, “he got three of those guys over there that were trying to kill us.” He gestured behind us, and I turned, noticing for the first time that there were three bodies on the floor, drenched in red like Scott had just let the cloud go over them once he was done emptying them out.
“I don’t know what to say besides damn,” I said, looking around. I eased back in the direction we’d been going before. The factory had gone silent, not a sound but the spray of chemicals out the side of ruptured vats in the air, no hint of further opposition waiting anywhere around us. “And … I think we won.”
“Good,” Reed said. “Because … I don’t know how much more of that,” he nodded at Scott and the cloud of floating blood, “I want to see. Ever.”
“You think that’s bad,” Jamal said, “wait ’til you see what he does with it once he’s—”
As if to perfectly illustrate the point, Scott moved his hand and the cloud of blood splattered against a nearby wall with a sick noise like someone had thrown spaghetti against it, a rich sound of thick liquid that had a little element of a sucking noise to make it all the worse. And as if that weren’t bad enough, it looked like he’d smashed someone against it and turned them into a splatter painting.
I felt a little sick in my guts. “Did you have to do that?” I asked, watching Scott seem to come out of a trance.
“Did you want it splashing around your shoes?” he asked, balling his hand into a fist and then relaxing it, over and over.
“No.”
“Then yeah, I had to do that,” Scott said. “The room’s clear now. No other hostiles. Or anyone, actually.”
“Good,” Reed said, looking around like he didn’t quite believe Scott. I couldn’t blame him. That was the sort of thing that tended to change your opinion of a man, and not for the better. Reed looked like he was anticipating an ambush, too, but he kept his head about him. “Then I guess we’re done here.”
“But not with this group,” I said. “Not if there are more of these guys out there, like Omar, in the distribution channel.”
“No,” Reed agreed. “And we’re going to get after them—as soon as we clean up this mess with the local PD.” He lowered his head, and adopted a hard look, like someone had stepped on his junk. “But if we keep this up—”
“Please, please, don’t let ‘keep it up’ mean we watch Scotty rip the blood out of more peoples’ unresisting bodies,” Jamal said.
“He was very definitely resisting,” Scott said. “Right up ’til the end.”
“—If we keep this up,” Reed said, talking over both of them, “… there are ten names on our list in the eastern US. If we can get after them today, with a little electronic aid from J.J. and Abby …” A small smile of satisfaction emerged, like he hadn�
��t just seen a dude’s blood ripped entirely from his body, “… then we might just see the end of this organization by tomorrow morning.”
48.
Sienna
Everything around me was on fire, and you’d think I’d be used to that, like it was some perfectly normal status quo for me.
But it was not.
“Shit,” I said.
Everything’s on fire again, Eve crowed. You really have a way about you, you know? You should visit a fireworks store next, really cement your reputation for sowing havoc with a pretty display of sky snakes in red, blue and green.
Or you could go the Guy Friday route and red, white and blue it up, Zack said dryly.
Those are my colors, too, technically, Harmon said, though I prefer them a bit more understated rather than as a full blown display, garishly lighting up the night sky.
“Hey, guys, let’s not lose sight of the fact that everything is burning and our new replacement supervillain is still lurking out here somewhere,” I said, trying to get them—and myself—to focus. It was kind of distracting being in the center of a massive inferno. I may have been immune to the burn, but the smoke still bothered my eyes and threatened to overwhelm me.
Do you hear that in the distance? Harmon asked.
“Hear wh—”
Harmon boosted my hearing somehow, maybe tapping me into Chase or Sam’s head for a second. But a distant sound I’d perceived only barely over the roaring flames a moment ago became a lot starker and clearer in an instant.
Police sirens. The cops were coming.
“Good thing I’m microscopic right now,” I said. It wasn’t actually a good thing, obviously, but in the realm of tragedies and problems I was dealing with, it seemed like the answer to a rather sizable one—dodging the cops when they came out in force.
I lagged a little, dropped a hundred feet, and caught myself just in time to avoid a flaming particle of wood that was burning in the air like an ember on the wind.
Watch yourself, Gavrikov said, you just used a tremendous amount of your energy trying to start and then contain the flames.
“No wonder I feel exhausted,” I said, trying to keep aloft. “At least now I know that trying to keep this place from burning down at my size is pretty much a fool’s errand.”
Yes, now you can just give up and fly off, Eve suggested.
I looked over the scene and realized that Chase was stuck in the middle of two particularly ugly conflagrations, wood piles that were tipping over, spilling lit tree trunks around her. There was a pall of black smoke over her, and she was coughing furiously, head down, her lightsaber shield working to protect her from the flames nearest her.
“Yeah … I really can’t do that,” I said and darted toward Chase. I couldn’t just leave her here, trapped, unable to see where she was going. I flew straight for her ear canal, trying my best to absorb some fire as I went. It went about as well as me trying to put out this entire place with nothing but some tears, but I tried it anyway.
I zipped into Chase’s ear and shouted, “Chase! It’s Sienna!”
She was coughing so furiously, I wondered if she’d heard me. But then she stopped that barking, hard cough for a second and said, “I can’t see … anything …” And she started hacking again.
“Dammit,” I muttered. I couldn’t really do much of anything at this size. I was way, way too small to be able to affect her, push her in any direction. Still … I could at least see … “We need to go to your right. There’s about a fifteen-foot gap of open space before another flaming log pile. I think you can get out that way.”
“… Okay,” she said between barking coughs, and started staggering in that direction, holding up her saber shield against the heat of the nearest blaze. I could feel it from inside her ear; the shield wasn’t helping much that I could tell.
Chase staggered, and I bounced around a little inside her canal, hitting a waxy buildup. “Yuck,” I said, trying to keep close to the exit so I could dart out and look, watchful eye ready to call out the next turn. “Okay, another couple feet and then a hard right turn … that’s it … stop. Now walk forward …”
She was staggering, head down, which gave me an angle to pop my head out of her ear like it was manhole cover. Or actually, more like the Millennium Falcon coming out of that cave in the asteroid in Empire. Either way, I had enough of a view to be able to call out the next direction. “Take a left!”
Chase staggered, dipping a little lower. The smoke was getting thicker, wind shifting directions. She launched into a terrible cough, a series of hacking barks that forced me out of her ear because her head was moving too much. She sagged to her knees, sounding like she was going to lose a lung.
“Shitty shit shit,” I said, trying to figure out what I could do to help her. She was stalled, and the fire was closing. I was just too small to push her along, or help her …
Too small in your current form, Bastian said. Maybe if you were just a touch bigger …
“Damn,” I said. I’d rejected the idea of going Quetzlcoatl earlier because the size differential didn’t seem like it’d make much difference, but what other choice did I have? In the bigger form, maybe I could at least give her a push, some guidance that didn’t involve me shouting in her ear like a miniature case of tinnitus or a quieter version of the souls in my head. “Yeah. Okay.” I flew out of her head and darted around her back. “Here goes nothing …”
I could feel the change coming. My arms started to stretch, becoming the wings of the dragon, and my legs pulled together, melding to form my long, snaking tail. I felt my nose elongate like a snout, brushing against Chase’s back, pushing against her—
And suddenly, she felt very, very small against my nose, because she was stuck between my nostrils and just above my jaw.
What the hell? I called out in my mind, trying to figure out if Sam had gotten to her, maybe shrank her down just as I was growing to dragon size. But no, it was more than that; the flames that had surrounded me were getting smaller, the black clouds that once blotted out the sky were shrinking, and I could see the trees past them, just barely, again, as my head, and Chase on my snout, extended beyond the perimeter of the lumberyard fire.
“Whoa!” I roared as my explosive growth flung Chase free of the flames and into the woods, where she landed in a roll and came up coughing, eyes bleary with tears. “I think dragon form just cleared up my shrinkage problem.”
And left you with a brand new one, Harmon said, voice tinged with alarm.
“What new—”
Something hit my wing and rocked me sideways, ripping a hole in my flank as it spun me over, lifting my snake belly up into the air. A line of stinging pains ran along my side from my tail to my lungs, punching in hard like needles or—
Bullets.
I caught a glimpse of the trouble as my body rolled with the attack, a bunch of black SUVs and Army Humvees with mounted weaponry chattering at the entrance to the lumberyard, just ahead of a legion of fire trucks. They had a whole damned task force out there, FBI and military, fifty troops and law enforcement guys, all firing on me.
My wing got chewed up in a machine gun blast and something else tore off my tail, causing me so much pain I screamed in a dragon roar as I dropped, falling back into the cloaking fire beneath me. Hard impacts tore across my shoulder as I changed back into human form involuntarily under the withering storm of bullets. I was bleeding from a hundred wounds, and I hit the gravel and lay there, coughing up blood, the smoke around me threatening to devour me in the blackness of the cloud.
“Wolfe …” I coughed, blood running freely down my chin.
Hurrying.
Hang on, Harmon said. Help is on the way.
“There’s no … help for this …” I said, running a hand over my chest. There were so many pitted marks in my skin, so many wounds … blood was flowing out like waterfalls, hot, sticky liquid running down me. “… if I heal … try to run … they’re gonna … shoot me down …” The sou
nd of thousands of bullets filling the air above me still rumbled over the licking of the flames on either side.
Hold on, Harmon said. Just another minute.
“I don’t … think it matters,” I said, eyeing the nearest fire. The wood pile next to me groaned. It was going to topple over any second, a machine gun chipping away at it and sending embers sparking into the air around me.
Job’s not done, Bastian said. Come on. Up and at ’em.
They just ate up our dragon form with enough gunfire to kill an army, Roberto, I said. The wounds were starting to knit on my chest. How did they even get here so fast?
Apparently they picked you up over Canada, Harmon said. They were already en route before this started.
“Oh,” I said, staring up at the sky. I could see a hint of blue somewhere between the black clouds. It seemed nice. A nice place to be on a day like this. “They’re … not going to stop, are they?”
Harmon was slow to respond, and when he did, he didn’t sound very satisfied at the answer. No. Not this time. Not anymore.
“Friday was right; they really are going to grind me down,” I said, the back of my head all the way down to my heels feeling the bite of the hard gravel where it rested against my naked skin.
Come on, Eve said. We have things to do. We still have to save that idiot from assassination. And frankly, your shoulders could use more work.
“I don’t know, man. This is getting pretty outrageously tough. I think this is the part where most people would throw in the towel.”
You are not most people, Bjorn said.
The wounds were gone, but the blood and the pain had stayed, mingling with the bite of those rocks against my skin. “No, I’m not,” I said, morose, looking once again at the logs about to topple over on me. Tons of weight, landing solidly on me. Felt like an appropriate metaphor. “And I never will be one of them again. Not after all this.”
Ten seconds, Harmon said.
“Ten seconds to what?” I asked, the lumber at my side straining and cracking. I waited for the answer, but it did not come, so I just lay there, waiting for the lumber to fall over on me. I doubted it would kill me, but sooner or later maybe the bullets would, or the task force would enter the lumberyard and find me, pumping me full of lead.
Small Things (Out of the Box Book 14) Page 25